This invention relates to a method and apparatus for facilitating face-to-face communication. More specifically, the invention relates to a wearable display that has communication capability, allowing the wearers' displays to communicate with each other, either with or without any action by the wearer.
Over the past several years, technology has been developed at the Media Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to facilitate face-to-face communication. One of the inventors of this invention has done pioneering work in the development of “intelligent badges” worn by meeting participants to take the place of paper badges. Early incarnations of this technology used badges that contained multiple LEDs that communicated with each other. The signals transmitted between the badges denoted the answers to preprogrammed, multiple-choice questions. By watching the number of LEDs that lighted up when two people wearing these badges came close to each other, you could ascertain the number of multiple-choice questions that the two people answered with the same choice. For example, if there were five LEDs on the badge, and three lighted up when the two people approached each other, they both knew that they had answered three questions with the same choice.
This technology was later expanded by included coded ideas. Data could be entered into the badges expressing an idea. An idea was displayed in text on a wearer's badge. When two wearers approached each other, if one agreed with the idea of the other (he could read the idea on the other person's badge), he could press a button on his own badge and that idea would be “accepted.” Since the acceptance was memorized, data could be gathered at the meeting about which ideas received wider and which received lesser levels of acceptance among the participants.